"So you like magic, do you?" Tina jumped and looked over her shoulder. The old librarian was standing there. He was a frail man, with loosely wrinkled skin, who probably stood no more than a few inches taller than Tina. He had a gravelly voice. Tina shook her head as she pushed the book into the return slot.

"It's not real." She had been so excited when she had found the book, but what was inside wasn't real magic, only tricks made to fool people. Tina had felt like the biggest fool of all after she had read it.

The librarian was thoughtful for a moment, one white eyebrow arched gently. He brought a hand to his chin. "Maybe not the magic in there." He gestured toward the slot. "But when you have lived as long as I have, and seen all that I have seen, you realize that magic isn't pulling a rabbit out of a hat or a bird out of thin air."

"What is it, then?" Tina tried for disdain; she was, after all, ten years old. Much too old to believe in magic in the first place. The old man smiled and gazed over her head, looking at the dusty bookshelves without seeing them.

"Magic is watching a mother smile at her newborn baby, magic is the smell after it rains, the sun shining on the snow. Magic is feeling wonder when the rabbit comes out of the empty hat. It is loving and it is hating. It is remembering. It is thinking." He looked down at Tina with sparkling eyes. "Magic is everything in this world. It is everyone. Do you understand?"

Tina blinked and shook her head and quickly walked away.It would be years later, when she had fallen in love and had children, when she spent long hours remembering and thinking, that she would understand what that old librarian had been getting at. And after that, when she heard her children squabbling over the phoniness of a magic trick, she would go to them, and reveal what real magic is.